Science used to be done on the margins of otherwise tangibly useful social activity, mostly education. National defense funding began the transformation of science into a professional activity. Even then, so called undirected science would be done on the margins of the goal oriented development of military technologies. Massive funding of science by governments is a relatively new development, beginning in earnest after WW2. As with other things in life, money changes everything.It is well past time to become realistic about science by admitting that scientists and scientific institutions respond to economic incentives like everyone else. In fact, science is more easily corrupted than most of other areas of social activity because science lacks the disciplining influence of the markets. Public money is divided by program monitors who are often clueless and relying on self-referential committees of grant recipients. Getting grants makes or breaks careers and is a difference between being a miserable adjunct or a tenured professor with a good pension and benefits. Economic pressures in science mean that scientific institutions and scientists can be manipulated by those with money: industries, politicians and political pressure groups with money to give away. The winners in science, and thus future leaders of scientific societies, are the winners of the money race which does not necessarily coincide with scientific quality, or personal integrity. Winning is everything.

There may not be easy answers to these problems, as one would not want to throw the proverbial baby with the bathwater. However, mere acknowledgment may be the first step towards a solution. It will also facilitate public understanding of pathologies in science like, for example, the global warming industry. Honesty and transparency is the best disinfectant and may actually increase public confidence in science.

There are actually many who are reflecting on serious problems in science. Few discuss the increasing number of scientists, however, which I find apropos. And discussion of the ecosystem is very limited, while this is the first time I’ve seen it named as such. Unfortunately, those that might revolutionize the whole system are either ignorant of most details or content with the devil they know. Science has lost credibility due to exaggerated and conflicting claims certainly, but also because published research is unreliable. While efforts are underway to address this, the unreliability receives about as much attention in the lay press as in journals.

The rapid growth in "academic managers", aka research support staff, has driven a shift from promotion and funding based on meritocracy to one based on "metrictocracy" such as h and other short term impact factors.

Excellent reflective article on the industrialisation of scientific knowledge and the growing threat of the rise of esteem factors and indices to rank and quantify scientific and intellectual production. In my own academic ecosystem I see the impact of these trends, where rankings, citations and narrow simplistic goals have sliced and packaged intellectual inquiry into easy to consume measure and attribute bite sized chunks. Abstract thought and Beauty, intrinsic and inherent logic and connecting disconnected and unrelated ideas alas is too much for the age of economic rationalism. The horrific results from the citation blockchain of h- indices show just how narrow mono tonic our scholarly ecosystems have become. If one wishes to exist outside this frame, what are the choices? Not much !

An additional troubling factor in the state of science is a creeping deterioration of academic standards affecting both the humanities and the sciences. At least in the West, a greater proportion of the population than ever is pursuing - and getting - advanced degrees. In the countries with which I am most familiar, this has been accompanied by falling academic standards. The trend is visible not only in higher education, but in the conduct of science itself, reflected in rising numbers of retracted publications and badly written articles. Scientific papers with gross grammatical mistakes in the very title of the paper is a trivial but telling sign of trouble in science.

Actually the single biggest problem Science and Scientists have is loss of faith in them by non-scientists. Ranging from Economists who are viewed has paid shills for the wealthy too Medical researchers who turn out to have paid positions from the Pharma companies whose products they are evaluating. To various and assorted other fiddles and dodges. That Scientists and Science in general are new longer viewed has honest or Ethical is a much larger problem then the ones the author lists here. Science and scientists have Way to many conflicts of interests and damn little ethics these days. What point science if a large number headed to a majority no longer believe what you have to say? And in many cases can find another expert to say just the opposite depending on what results the people who are funding the study want.

I agree that too many scientists are dishonest these days. The reason is that far too much research is now under the control of for-profit entities, who invariably subject scientists to counterproductive incentive structures, thus drawing people into the field who are not really good scientists. The best scientists are not motivated by fame or fortune, but rather by intense curiosity. Sure, they want to feed their families, but what they want most of all is to discover the elusive truth about whatever question has caught their attention. Just to KNOW.

Science used to be much more of a closed community (in the U.S., at any rate) in that research money was given out to scientists by other scientists who staffed public agencies like the NSF and NIH. That was a much better system for funding research than today's environment in which scientists' bosses seem to all be focused on fame (universities) and fortune (both universities and corporations).

Global access to vast quantities of other people's work is indeed a double-edged sword. It is undoubtedly the case that this knowledge explosion makes working faster and more effective. But there is a subtle, hidden loss. Let me try and explain from personal experience in my field, which is programming. Three decades ago, when faced with an unfamiliar problem, there was often little option but to think on it and invent viable solutions to the problem at hand. Of course, books and colleagues were available, but essentially you were on your own. The solutions thus arrived at varied in quality, from rubbish to original masterpieces, and likewise the implementation, from unmanageable spaghetti to tight well maintained gems.

Nowadays, the typical reaction to facing an unfamiliar programming problem is to plunder stackoverflow for expert postings and hunt through git and other sources of source (sic) for an answer, which likely will be right, and better than anything you yourself are likely to come up with. But something is lost. I accept that 9999 people out of 10000 will come up with something humdrum or worse than accepted solutions. But once in a while, someone, whose thoughts have not been polluted by other peoples ideas, would come up with an absolute humdinger of an original idea. And that originality and variety of different thinking has been lost in the now prevalent groupthink. I seriously feel the Web is altering the way humanity thinks, in many not-understood ways.

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PS OnPoint

The Mueller report in America, along with reports of interference in this week’s European Parliament election, has laid bare the lengths to which Russia will go to undermine Western democracies. But whether Westerners have fully awoken to the threat is an open question.

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